Twitter Funder[2]. cordycepsDear Dr. White, I am Dr. Malathie Dissanayake, m_dissa1974@yahoo.com, a developmental psychologist and a senior lecturer in psychology in Sri Lanka. Previously, I published two articles in the World Cultures eJournal. One of my colleagues and I would like to send articles to the ejournal. I am thankful to you, if you could let me know whether we can submit articles to the ejournal and if so, how to submit the articles. Yes, DRW: see: https://escholarship.org/uc/wc_worldcultures
Thank you. Dr. Malathie Dissanayake. Jan 2018

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More than 80 percent of taxpayers will receive a tax cut in 2018, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These tax cuts skew most heavily toward the top 5 percent of earners. This group — with incomes starting at $307,900 — would collect 42.6 percent of the tax cuts. By 2027, they would enjoy no less than 99.2 percent of the tax cuts.

2018 The ocean is running out of oxygen at a rapid speed—and the depletion could choke to death much of the marine life these waters support. A sweeping review published Thursday in Science documented the causes, consequences and solutions to what is technically called “deoxygenation.” They discovered a four-to-tenfold increase in areas of the ocean with little to no oxygen, which researchers say is alarming because half of Earth’s oxygen originates from the ocean.

2018 The Republican tax overhaul bestows an initial infusion of cash on nearly every taxpayer next year. That extra income is likely to please millions of households, support consumer spending and perhaps give the economy a short-term lift. Ordinary households should enjoy it while it lasts. Over the next several years, multiple analyses of the law have found, those tax cuts will gradually fade — and then morph into tax hikes for a majority of people who are solidly middle class. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-gop-welfare-medicare-social-security-cuts-20171201-story.html

Coming Taxes

Two features in the tax bill — a child tax credit and a $10,000 limit on state and local tax deductions — won't adjust to keep pace with inflation, thereby reducing their value each year. What's more, the individual tax cuts are set to expire after 2025. And once the individual tax rates revert to their former levels, a stingier inflation gauge would raise taxes for most households.

President Donald Trump has largely sidestepped these trade-offs in promoting the overhaul he's set to sign, a measure whose benefits largely favor corporations and wealthy individuals.

"The heart of our bill is a tremendous amount of relief for the middle class," the president said Wednesday. "It will be an incredible Christmas gift for hard-working Americans."

Trump has also said that "whoever" is president in 2025 would ensure that the expiring tax cuts for individuals are renewed. But doing so would cost heavily: The national debt would likely balloon by over $2 trillion — far more than the $1.5 trillion increase that lawmakers approved for the tax cuts — according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The rising debt could eventually force spending cuts to social and educational programs that serve many who aspire to join the middle class. Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan have both raised the prospect of reducing spending on social services next year, with Ryan specifically mentioning changes to Medicare.

Trump, Republican lawmakers and their allies are betting that higher take-home pay from the tax cuts will shore up public support for a bill that poll show a sizable number of Americans view unfavorably. They also appear confident that ordinary Americans will have no objection if corporations and the wealthy receive the bulk of the tax-cut gains so long as middle class households, on average, also receive some benefits.

More than 80 percent of taxpayers will receive a tax cut in 2018, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These tax cuts skew most heavily toward the top 5 percent of earners. This group — with incomes starting at $307,900 — would collect 42.6 percent of the tax cuts. By 2027, they would enjoy no less than 99.2 percent of the tax cuts.

DONALD TRUMP horror - harm he does to the planet

Trump cuts social security.?
Trump faith misplaced in memo reportedly focused on Carter Page
Rachel Maddow notes reporting that the subject of the Nunes memo is Carter Page, who has a long history with U.S. intelligence and Russia and unfortunately... Rachel Maddow notes reporting that the subject of the Nunes memo is Carter Page, who has a long history with U.S. intelligence and Russia and unfortunately for Trump is not a sympathetic figure for abuse of surveillance.
Lawyer overhaul creates intrigue in Mueller's Rick Gates case
Rachel Maddow shares some intriguing new reporting about Paul Manafort co-defendant Rick Gates changing his legal team in his case being prosecuted by Robert...
Himes: Nunes memo is a transparent political hit job
Rep. Jim Himes, member of the House Intelligence Committee, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump and Republican political strategy around the Devin...
Devin Nunes didn't read the intel behind his own memo
"What's important to realize is the chairman of this committee who's pushing this memo out hasn't even read the underlying materials himself."
Why Trump’s War on the Deep State Is Failing—So Far

By Benjamin Wittes Monday, January 1, 2018, 10:00 AM
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In May of 2016, when Donald Trump was still a long-shot candidate for president, I warned with some specificity about what he would try to do to the U.S. Department of Justice and the law enforcement apparatus of the United States:

The humanitarian crises in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are ongoing. People have gone without electricity, clean water, or open schools, businesses, and hospitals for four months. Florida, Texas, and California are continuing the slow process of rebuilding, without federal aid, after suffering from natural disasters. Community health centers ran out of federal funding four months ago, and more than one hundred DACA recipients lose their legally protected status every day. Funding the government for weeks at a time, followed by a government shutdown, continues to threaten the readiness of our military, and the well-being of our troops and their families. These issues have been floundering for far too long. The people of our country deserve action and results.

Instead, they've seen a tax bill get passed that disproportionately benefits corporations on the backs of working families while adding over $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit. We continue to see environmental protections eroded, subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, loosening of regulations for big Wall Street banks, and Big Pharma continuing to flood our streets with opioids, fueling the epidemic that is ravaging our country. The people of Hawai‘i and this country are paying the price for decades of failed leadership, as we now live under the threat of a nuclear attack from North Korea. The Trump administration is doubling down on their cozy ties with Saudi Arabia, providing them with arms, intelligence, and military support as they wage war on Yemeni civilians. This administration is continuing to wage costly, counterproductive regime change wars, promising to keep U.S. troops in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria indefinitely.

Enough is enough. The American people are ready for change.

The soft spot, the least tyrant-proof part of the government, is the U.S. Department of Justice and the larger law enforcement and regulatory apparatus of the United States government. The first reason you should fear a Donald Trump presidency is what he would do to the ordinary enforcement functions of the federal government, not the most extraordinary ones.
. . .

A prosecutor—and by extension, a tyrant president who directs that prosecutor—can harass or target almost anyone, and he can often do so without violating any law. He doesn't actually need to indict the person, though that can be fun. He needs only open an investigation; that alone can be ruinous. The standards for doing so, criminal predication, are not high. And the fabric of American federal law—criminal and civil law alike—is so vast that a huge number of people and institutions of consequence are ripe for some sort of meddling from authorities.
. . .

The Justice Department has some institutional defenses against this sort of thing, but they are far weaker than the intelligence community's institutional defenses against abuses. They mostly do not reside in statute or in . . . complex oversight structures. . . . They reside in the Levi Guidelines, in certain normative rules about contacts between the Justice Department and the White House, in norms that have developed over the years in the FBI. And they reside in the hearts of a lot of replaceable people.
. . .

What would a president need to do to shift the Justice Department to the crimes or civil infractions committed—or suspected—by Trump critics and opponents? He would need to appoint and get confirmed by the Senate the right attorney general. That's very doable. He'd want to keep his communications with that person limited. An unspoken understanding that the Justice Department's new priorities include crimes by the right sort of people would be better than the sort of chortling communications Richard Nixon and John Mitchell used to have.
. . .

Certainly, a bunch of pesky, scrupulous AUSAs might have to go. But that's not a problem. Make the environment hostile enough, and law firm life will start to look very attractive to them.

Yes, Trump might develop a problem with our redoubtable FBI director, who doesn't leave with the outgoing administration and has stared down a president once before. But so what? . . . [James] Comey will not be there forever anyway. And even without the FBI, and even using only the discretion it lawfully has, the Justice Department has remarkable fangs to bare when it chooses to bare them. NSA can only spy on people. Why bother with that when you can sue them?
As a statement of Trump’s aspiration, I could not—unfortunately—have been more spot-on. In the near-year he has been president, he has done or tried to do all of the things I flagged:

He has demanded substantive outcomes from investigations.
He has demanded investigations of political opponents.
He has raged against the norms that prevent these wishes from being fulfilled.
He has attacked—publicly and by name—people who have acted honorably to defend those norms.
He fired the redoubtable FBI director whom I flagged as an inconvenient bulwark—for precisely the reason that James Comey was functioning as an inconvenient bulwark.
He has harassed Comey’s management team and demanded publicly their replacement.
He has made the environment for those assistant U.S. attorneys committed to their jobs so uncomfortable that one literally sat in my office and told me that he was going to resign because “I don’t want to stand up in court any more and say, I’m [his name] and I represent the United States.”
He has appointed an attorney general he specifically intended to protect him and go after his opponents.

This is banana-republic-type stuff. One year into Trump’s term in office, his character has not changed. The president of the United States—as John Bellinger warned as early as December 2015 and as I elaborated on in March of 2016—remains the principal threat in the world to the national security of the United States. His aspirations are as profoundly undemocratic and hostile to the institutions of democratic governance as they have ever been. He announces as much in interview after interview, in tweet after tweet. The president has not changed, and he will not change. Whether he has grown or will grow is not even an interesting question.

The interesting question, one year in, is how the apparatus of democratic government is weathering his onslaught. The answer to this question is complicated but, I think, ultimately encouraging.

Let’s start with the frank acknowledgment that there has been damage and that this damage may prove severe. There is, at the visible level, the tangible damage that Trump has done to the institutions that protect national security and democratic governance as well as to confidence in the United States as a protector of democracy and, indeed, as a democratic actor on its own terms. This damage is hard to assess because a lot of it is invisible. It’s State Department Foreign Service officers who have left in droves. It’s people who went to law firms instead of becoming assistant U.S. attorneys. It’s marginal judgments made less well because of the political climate. The damage from these things is hard to measure and thus are easy to deny.

No less hard to measure is the damage Trump has done to world confidence in the United States or what it will take to restore that confidence once he is gone. I also don’t know how to assess the opportunity costs of the near total failure of policy development in his administration across a wide range of national security matters. Nor, for that matter, do I know how to evaluate the likelihood that Trump’s myriad personality defects will trigger a national security catastrophe, rather than merely the sequence of injuries (such as spontaneous disclosure of important allied intelligence programs to the Russians) and embarrassments (like his phone call with the Australian prime minister) we have seen so far. The hits taken by law enforcement and other domestic institutions have been real, but they have not yet done irreversible damage. So for right now, at least, my impression is that the tangible damage from Trump is likely substantial but also likely reparable with time and decent government of either the political right or the political left.

I am decidedly less confident about our ability to weather a less tangible form of damage Trump is doing—that is to say the damage of which he has shown proof of concept. It was only recently that the notion of a modern president of the United States openly demanding politicized law enforcement or openly saying that the job of the attorney general was to protect him from investigation was unthinkable. Even Richard Nixon, who believed such things privately and acted on them in secret, never had the audacity to state them publicly. Trump has not merely advocated for the notion of law enforcement as a mechanism of political attack; he has campaigned against those within the bureaucracy who have resisted the vision. He has adopted an active policy of institutional attack on the FBI and public discrediting of intelligence-community findings inconvenient to him on Russia. The question is whether this style of politics—or aspects of it—catches on. This may be hard to imagine if Trumpism ends in a crushing electoral defeat and repudiation. But what if Republicans outperform expectations in 2018 or Trump wins reelection in 2020 or both? What will other politicians take away then?

That is not an idle question—one germane only to future populist demagogues who may arise. Because Trump has not, alas, flown solo in this project of institutional degradation. He has brought much of his party with him. The House Republican caucus is up in arms not about L’Affaire Russe but about the special counsel’s investigation of L’Affaire Russe. The braying for Robert Mueller’s blood and for a housecleaning at the Justice Department and the FBI pervades conservative media. We have to be concerned that Trump is in the process of normalizing for an entire political movement the politicization and weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence. No, he has not yet successfully corrupted these institutions. But he has made surprising inroads in corrupting public expectations of them. That damage is hard to calculate—but it could end up being devastating.

So for right now, let’s consider the damage—both tangible and intangible—as a work in progress: non-trivial, potentially severe, but so far not catastrophic, and difficult ultimately to assess.

And despite all of that, I think we can say that, broadly speaking, the apparatus of democratic rule-of-law governance had held up reasonably well so far. Trump aspires to corrupt the Justice Department, but he has not yet managed to corrupt the Justice Department. He aspires to use the FBI to go after his political enemies, but he has not yet managed that either. He aspires to an intelligence community that will validate his premises, but he has not managed to get one. At the end of the day, Trump has not managed to shut down the Russia investigation. He has not managed to fire his attorney general or his deputy attorney general—both of whom he evidently hates. He has not even managed to rid himself of the lowly deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe—though he so clearly wants that particular scalp—who will retire in March and not be removed before then. He’s already angry at his new FBI director, Christopher Wray.

The president is evidently incredulous about his inability to corrupt these institutions. He waxed frustrated about it, for example, in a recent radio interview:

But you know, the saddest thing is, because I am the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing and I am very frustrated by it. I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her dossier, and the kind of money… I don’t know, is it possible that they paid $12.4 million for the dossier . . . which is total phony, fake, fraud and how is it used? It’s very discouraging to me. I’ll be honest, I’m very unhappy with it, that the Justice Department isn’t going . . . maybe they are but you know as President, and I think you understand this, as a President you’re not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something and at some point, maybe we are going to all have it out.
One might look at all of this as evidence that Trump is not wholly unwise, so he announces his intentions to do all sort of bad things but then ultimately does not pull the trigger on many of them. I think the better understanding is that he is, at least for now, meaningfully constrained—both by politics and by law and rules.

This is not to say that Trump has had no effect on the institutions in question. He has had an effect. At the most visible level, the effect is agency leadership that don’t effectively stand up for the rank and file. Wray is in an impossible position, as are Rod Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions. The intelligence-community leadership is too. Yet all have responded with little public institutional defense—which would necessarily require a confrontation with the president. Some, like Sessions and CIA Director Mike Pompeo—have added a distasteful dollop of active humoring of the president’s self-image. And some, like Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, have simply vanished from public view. The result has been tolerance of the Trumpian cult of personality. And that is certainly corrosive of the rule of law from agencies that are supposed to be about rigorous facts and analysis and even-handed application of the rules.

But for now, at least, the edifice has held. All of that could change tomorrow if Trump were to demand Mueller’s removal or demand things of the leadership at the Justice Department that would provoke a crisis. To say that someone is constrained, after all, is not to say that he is entirely immobilized or that he cannot overcome his constraints. The presidency is an office of titanic power, and what look like constraints today may look very different if Trump were to feel more immediately threatened by Mueller, if he feels more secure electorally or if he sees weakness in his currently resurgent political foes. But so far, at least, the president has done nothing to the Justice Department or the intelligence community that could not be repaired.

A number of factors have contributed to the edifice’s relative durability in the face of Trump’s personality and overt aspirations.

The first is that Trump has been checked more effectively by institutional constraints than many commentators acknowledge. Jack Goldsmith has made this point repeatedly—and he is clearly correct. Congress, which has enabled Trump in many respects and been lackadaisical about confronting his worst predations, has nonetheless checked him in other ways. The Senate intelligence committee’s Russia investigation has been a serious undertaking, and the legislature really boxed in the president with the sanctions legislation it passed last year. Sessions is still attorney general because Republican senators made clear that they wouldn’t tolerate his removal. And while support for Mueller on Capitol Hill has ebbed of late, when Trump made noises about firing him over the summer senators of both parties reacted strongly. (Trump has more recently disclaimed any intention of removing Mueller.) Some of us would like Congress to do a great deal more than it is in the way of protecting institutions, but it’s important to appreciate that it has not, in fact, done nothing.

More robust responses have come from the courts, the press and the bureaucracy. The ever-present factor of Trump’s unpopularity with the public—and the resulting political mobilization of forces to oppose him—has further reduced his room to maneuver.

And then there is the Mueller investigation itself, which has kept the administration very much on tenterhooks; nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. While the president’s lawyers talk a tough game about how he’s entitled to do anything he wants with respect to managing the executive branch, they are clearly concerned about how his interactions with the investigation or the Justice Department might be seen to a group of prosecutors that is already examining obstruction-of-justice questions in connection with prior such interactions. Mueller has Trump walking on eggshells.

The cumulative impact has been an environment not all that conducive to imposing tyranny. So Trump tweets. He rails. He complains. He threatens. Yet the investigation goes on. Law-enforcement activity continues more or less as usual—there being plenty of assistant U.S. attorneys who are still willing to stand up in court and say that they represent the United States. And while the president’s machinations have some impact, of course, they have far less impact than one would imagine they should in an executive branch meant to be unitary. This is part of a far broader pattern of the executive branch ignoring its titular head, who is increasingly isolated within it.

This brings me to a final factor that has protected the country and its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus from Trump’s tyrannical aspirations: Trump’s personality.

The first few weeks of the Trump administration raised the question of the degree to which Trump’s malevolence would be tempered by his incompetence. In the first year of the Trump presidency, the answer to that question was that incompetence did a lot of tempering. Trump blundered from crisis to crisis. The lawyering around him was comically dreadful—as was the broader executive functioning. Taking on established democratic institutions and wrecking them actually takes a certain amount of focus and energy—and Trump just isn’t very good at it. His heart may be in it, but Vladimir Putin he isn’t. And the United States isn’t a fragile new democracy with weak institutions either.

Trump has another personality liability for the project at hand, one that fewer people notice: He is ultimately a wuss. He talks about his boldness all the time, and a lot of people—including his enemies—lap up the self-description. He likes to talk in sweeping, grandiose terms about the things he is going to do and the things he has done. In practice, however, he’s actually very cautious most of the time. Think about it this way: Leaving aside Trump’s words and claims about himself, do the actions of his first year in office generally bespeak boldness? Yes, he left the Paris Climate Agreement. And yes, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And yes, he did the travel ban. But think about all of the bold things Trump has promised and backed away from: scrapping NAFTA and waging a trade war against the Chinese, ditching the Iran deal, walking away from Europe, draining the swamp, and confronting conservative orthodoxy on taxation.

The boldest step Trump has taken, the firing of James Comey, was an accident. Trump actually appears to have believed that this move would be popular, because Comey had angered Democrats during the 2016 campaign. Most of Trump’s supposed boldness is just tweets and bombast and things he says. It’s a big part of his self-image, but the self-image is mostly a game of dress-up. When push comes to shove, he’s pretty paralyzed by circumstances much of the time.

Taking down an established democracy requires not merely words but also bold action. And paralysis won’t cut it. A genuine attack on American democratic institutions will require some heavy swings of a sledgehammer at a very well-built wall. And with one great exception, nothing Trump has done in his first year in office has really taken pieces out of that wall.

What’s that one exception? It’s Trump’s efforts to hollow out the bureaucracy. As the Washington Post reports, it’s not just the State Department that he’s gutting:

Nearly a year into his takeover of Washington, President Trump has made a significant down payment on his campaign pledge to shrink the federal bureaucracy, a shift long sought by conservatives that could eventually bring the workforce down to levels not seen in decades.

By the end of September, all Cabinet departments except Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Interior had fewer permanent staff than when Trump took office in January—with most shedding many hundreds of employees, according to an analysis of federal personnel data by The Washington Post.
This effort sweeps far more broadly than simply impacting the institutions of national security and law enforcement under the rule of law. It’s about governance as a whole. But it may be a more effective—precisely because it is less visible—means of attacking what the Trump forces offensively term the “Deep State” than all of the high-profile attacks on law enforcement and intelligence leadership.

All of which is to emphasize that we are emphatically not out of the woods. The situation remains dangerous, because Trump’s personality is so fundamentally incompatible with the nature and demands of the office he holds. His impulsiveness can get us into trouble any day. As his political situation, or his legal situation, continues to degrade, he could lash out and change the equilibrium at any time. Moreover, chipping away at institutions slowly, both by institutional and budgetary evisceration and by leadership attrition—one Chuck Rosenberg a few months ago, one James Baker last month, one Andrew McCabe in March—will take a big toll over time.

But Trump simply cannot look back on the last year and be satisfied with the success of his war on the Deep State. His battle to remake it in his image has been largely unavailing—and has come at far greater cost to his presidency than to the institutions he is trying to undermine.

Trump Is Vandalizing Our Wild Heritage - The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/.../trump-national-monuments-bears-ears.html
Dec 1, 2017 - But in the coming days, President' Trump will try to shatter that promise. The president is expected to travel to Utah on Monday to announce that he is repealing protections for as many as two million acres of public land in the American West, an area more than six times the size of Grand Teton National Park, ...

Refill KEYTOPROFEN -Karen. I got a mystery message on my office phone, a package for D. to be delivered Dec. 14...number 3405609723 call 866 449-1744 to straighten this out please. I called and after awhile they said it was for D. so I am emailing you. best, Karen --

Douglas R. White (born 1942) is an American complexity researcher, social anthropologist, sociologist, and social network researcher at the University of California, Irvine. He attended the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and the University of Minnesota, where he received a B.A. in 1964, an M.A. in 1967, and a Ph.D. in 1969, all under advisor E. Adamson Hoebel and the Travelling Scholars Program.

White taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1967 to 1976. Since then he has been a Social Science Professor at the University of California, Irvine, teaching in Social Relations, in Comparative Culture, in Social Networks and in Anthropology. He co-founded and chaired the Social Networks PhD program and within the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences chaired the Social Dynamics and Complexity research group and the UC four-campus videoconference group.

He is on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, was on the governing Council of the European Complex Systems Society, and served as President of the Social Science Computing Association and of the Linkages Development Research Council.

He founded the World Cultures electronic journal in 1985 as part of the movement for open access scientific data and publication and founded the open access and peer reviewed Structure and Dynamics electronic journal in 2005, where he continues as editor-in-chief.

He is a recipient of the U.S. Distinguished Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the "Best Paper in Mathematical Sociology of 2004" Award of the American Sociological Association (2004), and of the 2007 "Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship Award" for the outstanding article published in the field of economic sociology in the previous two years.

Work

Major contributions of Douglas R. White:

White is known for Cross-cultural studies, studies of the division of labor, sexual division of labor, polygyny, marriage and kinship, his collaborative creation of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS with G. P. Murdock), and public domain distribution of SCCS data, courseware and software, which has given way to the UCI Complex Social Science Gateway that hosts Anthropology's Ethnographics of the Lives of World Peoples along with software used in solving Galton's problem of autocorrelation for analysis of observational data, and for research on:
Longitudinal historical evolution and field studies of human groups, larger societies, and city systems
Mathematical modeling of social, economic, and historical dynamics, as well as statistical entailment analysis, Galton's problem, the Natchez Paradox, Structural endogamy and network simulation, regular equivalence, flow centrality, and structural cohesion,
Social networks, including, more specifically, the network realism paradigm,
Social complexity and complex-network system dynamics.
Standard Cross-Cultural Sample
System dynamics Studies of world system dynamics and urban studies, including his current studies of urban dynamics over the last millennium,
A reaction to his latest book, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems, by one reviewer, was that this "could be the most important book in anthropology in fifty years." His work on implications of feedback and feedforward processes, published in Physical Review in collaboration with the founder of nonextensive physics, a founder of chaos theory, and two young computer scientists, provides one of the foundational network simulations for understanding complex networks.

The Plot to Loot America’s Wilderness: A little-known bureaucrat named James Cason, a lobbyist for big oil, gas, coal and mining corporations that operate on public and Indian lands, including former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Solicitor David Bernhardt, and former Deputy Secretary Steven Griles, who was indicted earlier this year on obstruction of justice charges over his involvement with criminal former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and (who) is reshaping the Department of the Interior. and ...part of a department-wide purge, and that climate scientists in particular were targeted. Cason, who once described himself as the department’s “regulatory czar,” has also overseen the dismantling of rules governing energy development on public lands. The DOI is poised to open up millions of acres to drilling and mining—from Utah’s red-rock country to the frigid, perilous waters off Alaska’s coast—while stripping away basic environmental protections and reducing transparency. Across the Trump administration, the new mantra is “energy dominance”—a vision of the world in which the United States will amplify its influence with a dramatic expansion of oil, gas, and coal production, whatever the environmental costs.

Last month Wendy Cleland-Hamnett in Falls Church, Va, retired last month (2017) as the top official overseeing pesticides and toxic chemicals as the E.P.A. “I had become irrelevant,” she said about changes there under the Trump administration.

The assault on science at the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump Administration is unprecedented. Experienced academic scientists have been removed from advisory boards and replaced with industry shills. Key regulations on proven carcinogens and mutagens like trichloroethylene have been abandoned without explanation. Trump's “Red Teams” are being set up to challenge the scientific consensus in peer-reviewed journals. Finally, the free speech of EPA scientists is being censored by Trump’s political appointees – which is exactly what happened this week (Oct 24, 2017) when EPA scientists were ordered to cancel their talks on climate change at a scientific conference.

Last week, EPA scientists were scheduled to participate in a conference on the environmental health of Narragansett Bay, the largest estuary in New England and key to the region’s fishing and tourism industries. The EPA scientists were to deliver keynote presentations on current and prospective environmental damage to the bay from climate change. However, at the last minute, the EPA announced without explanation that the three scientists scheduled to appear at the conference would not attend. The motivation was clear – to silence the scientists working on and speaking publicly about climate change. There has not been such a concerted and well-funded effort at distorting and silencing scientific research since Congress “debated” the link between smoking cigarettes and cancer.
--- Rep. Schiff puts end to question of Trump Russia collusion as Rachel Maddow shares video of Congressman Adam Schiff listing the times that Russia reached out to help the Donald Trump campaign.

"Resist Trump installing an IRS acting commissioner who could interfere with audits and investigations into Trump and his associates' potential tax fraud and money laundering."] IRS Commissioner John Koskinen’s term ends in November. But instead of nominating someone who would face Senate confirmation, Trump could simply name a trusted crony as a “temporary” appointment who would wield the exact same power.2 The Senate must pressure Trump to not install a puppet IRS commissioner without senators’ advice and consent. We can win this fight if all the members of the Senate Democratic caucus and key Republican senators who are concerned about the integrity of the Russia investigation hold firm. Our activism is crucial, and it works. Together we have stopped Trumpcare three times, and now we must demonstrate that the public is paying attention and will not tolerate Trump picking an IRS chief while he or his associates are under investigation for wrongdoing, potentially including tax fraud and money laundering.

Toni G. Atkins (D) District 39 call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121 to be connected with the office of one your senators. When someone answers, say this: "Hi, my name is ___ and I’m calling from ___. I strongly urge you to oppose the nomination of Sam Clovis – a racist and a climate change denier with no background in food or agriculture. - Clovis - Trump plan re Iran nuclear dal. In a statement sent to HuffPost exclusively by Meryl Streep’s longtime publicist Leslee Dart, Streep says she did not know that Weinstein― with whom she has collaborated for years on films like “August: Osage County” and “The Iron Lady” and once referred to as a “God”― was engaging in “inappropriate, coercive acts” and that he had paid financial settlements to at least eight women after they accused him of harassment and assault. After spending a weekend screaming at NFL and NBA athletes over Twitter, Donald Trump has embarrassed our country yet AGAIN. Stop Trump and Pruitt from undoing the Clean Power Plan! And David Letterman believes we should BOOT Trump out of office.

The Senate must pressure Trump to not install a puppet IRS commissioner without senators’ advice and consent. We can win this fight if all the members of the Senate Democratic caucus and key Republican senators who are concerned about the integrity of the Russia investigation hold firm. Our activism is crucial, and it works. Together we have stopped Trumpcare three times, and now we must demonstrate that the public is paying attention and will not tolerate Trump picking an IRS chief while he or his associates are under investigation for wrongdoing, potentially including tax fraud and money laundering.

Trump has already installed more than 1000 political appointments to head up federal agencies – all without Senate approval !! The administration has been able to place industry insiders and shadowy Trump loyalists in charge of much of the government’s day-to-day operations. Trump could do the same thing with the IRS, unless the Senate insists that he play by the rules.3

Even before the 2016 election, the IRS joined the FBI in investigating former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on suspicion of money laundering and tax fraud.4 In recent weeks, the IRS has coordinated with special counsel Mueller on his investigation of Manafort and other Trump associates, including former White House national security adviser, Michael Flynn.5 As Mueller’s investigation has gotten closer to Trump’s finances, Trump has accused the special counsel of crossing a line, prompting many to speculate that Mueller's firing is imminent.6

The IRS' cooperation is crucial for federal prosecutors in investigating tax crimes, and Trump has made it clear he will go to great lengths to hinder Mueller’s investigation – possibly even installing someone loyal to him to oversee the IRS. The Senate must intercede now – we need to keep reminding Democrats to use their power to keep Trump from being able to advance his dangerous agenda on any front, especially when it comes to the agency investigating his ties to Russia.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt just announced that he is repealing President Obama’s signature plan to stop climate change.
It’s the biggest environmental rollback we’ve seen since Trump withdrew
from the Paris Accord. Now, President Obama’s plan to decrease carbon emissions will be GONE. Big business polluters will be able to DESTROY our planet. And it’s all because Scott Pruitt,
Donald Trump, and Republicans want to score political points with big business polluters -- and undo President Obama’s legacy. It’s indefensible. It’s life-threatening. And it will devastate our environment. Pruitt will roll back this rule October 10, 2017.

Whereabouts never to use a Debit Card <---

Also of Interest - If your credit card is compromised, the harm to you is relatively small. You contact the issuer to report false charges and you may have to do some paperwork, but no money leaves your hands. --> --> With debit card --> fraud, however, there is money that leaves your hands. And you have to fight to get your own money back. Unfortunately, it’s now taking longer and longer to get that money back.

Two-Factor Authentication: Add a Layer of Protection to Your Online Accounts
10 Places to Ask for a Discount
Get Involved: Learn How You Can Give Back
Join AARP: Savings, resources and news for your well-being

Computer, legit most likely

*Computer scams? *not UCI James Smith of UC but 1 844 730 8362 with "Windows" : scammer says he worked for me six months earlier for $198 also for a new Windows $198, adding "oh, we also have a Mac Department"

callername.com/8447308362 844 730 8362
Below is the caller ID information for 844-730-8362. Please feel free to leave any feedback. You can flag the number as safe or unsafe and leave any relevant ...

places-to-never-use-a-debit-card

Scams

Medical Scams

Six Places Never to Use a Credit Card Sid Kirchheimer

Hotel check-in Scam

This is one of the smartest scams I have heard about. You
arrive at your hotel and check in at the front desk. Typically when
checking in, you give the front desk your credit card (for any charges
to your room) and they don't retain the card.
You go to your room and settle in. All is good.
The hotel receives a call and the caller asks for (as an example) room
620 - which happens to be your room.
The phone rings in your room. You answer and the person on the other end
says the following: 'This is the front desk. When checking in, we came
across a problem with your charge card information. Please re-read me
your credit card numbers and verify the last 3 digits numbers at the
reverse side of your charge card.'
Not thinking anything wrong, since the call seems to come from the front
desk you oblige. But actually, it is a scam by someone calling from
outside the hotel. They have asked for a random room number, then ask you for your credit card and address information. They sound so professional, that you think you are talking to the front desk.If you ever encounter this scenario on your travels, tell the caller that you will be down to the front desk to clear up any problems. Then,
go to the front desk or call directly and ask if there was a problem. If
there was none, inform the manager of the hotel that someone tried to
scam you of your credit card information, acting like a front desk
employee.

Reverse phone call scam

"856 917 0050" = Verizon

Facebook scams

Leigh Comstock Ok to all my friends and family....I did not send you an email at 1:02am this morning about HCG diet drops. I assure you that I was in bed sleeping. I don't know how it happened, but they got a hold of my email account and sent it to everyone that I have ever communicated with via my yahoo email. June 27 2012

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The complexity wiki

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An open community collaborative post-and-editing wiki on trans-disciplinary and especially networks and complexity sciences research that enriches each of the standard disciplines. Intended primarily for researchers, students, faculty and others engaged through individual and collaborative postings, courses, methods, shared and documented open-source software, tutorials, and tools for research and enhancing interdisciplinary advancement in the full range of overlapping human sciences, humanities, and natural and computer science, with interests in the complexity sciences, their teaching, and applications. For a USERid please contact drwhite@uci.edu to participate by login with your real name, which lets you edit and create new pages and to modify others using the "edit" tab. As you type into the "edit" text window the Firefox browser has automatic spell-check (OS X:control-Click).

Congress is set to double the cost of student loans from 3.4% to 6.8% --while offering huge corporate banks the low rate of 0.75%. May 10, 2013. How's that for the fat cats?

"California is the 4th-largest oil-producing state, but it is the ONLY state that does NOT tax Big Oil. We could raise $2 billion per year to begin repairing the damage of previous cuts to public education, but only if Democrats in the Legislature use their new super-majority power to pass it. Sarah Palin signed Alaska's oil severance tax of 25%! Texas charges 7.5%.(1) Why doesn't California make Big Oil pay for the privilege of profiting off our natural resources? State Senator Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) has proposed Senate Bill 241, which would tax oil extraction at a modest 9.9%. Public higher education would receive 93% of revenues, and 7% would go to the Department of Parks and Recreation." Courage Campaign May 4 2012.

"The law limiting overall contributions was enacted in 1974 and expanded in 2002 to prevent donors from writing million-dollar checks to candidates, which the Supreme Court has ruled could contribute to the corruption or at least the appearance of corruption of public officials." Breaking that law with oversight by the FEC, "The Huffington Post identified 49 individuals who donated more than $150,000 in the last election cycle, far in excess of the biennial contribution limits. Of the 49 donors, 48 exceeded the PAC and party limit and 32 exceeded the candidate limit." Huffpost May 3 2013.

RSN Dec 12 2012: Lawrence Tribe: "It badly distorts the meaning of everything I have written on the subject to treat me as remotely hostile to the comprehensive national regulation of firearms and ammunition possession, transfer, and use; and it even distorts my meaning to regard my views as similar to those that the Roberts Court has expressed on the subject, although I hasten to add that even this Court's unfortunate views leave very substantial room for close regulation and even prohibition of entire categories of dangerous firearms and the ammunition that makes them lethal. The fact that many of my fellow gun control proponents were disappointed by the nuanced character of what I wrote in 2000 shouldn't be allowed to distract from my continuing conclusion that the Constitution permits, and that sane public policy demands, vastly stricter firearms regulation than exists in the United States today.""

12Nov'12 Search for: Naomi Klein Author and activist | Shameless Disaster Capitalism | Naomi Klein, The Nation. Klein writes: As for Hurricane Sandy "This catastrophe very likely created by climate change -- a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer-is just one more opportunity for more deregulation."

9 Nov'12 For the first time ever, 1/3rd of our nation's 20-29 year olds have completed a Batchelor's degree.

6 Nov'12 Election: Through the process of an honest democratic election we regained a united country and have the opportunity to lift ours and the world economy out of the mini-depression that we got ourselves into through transgressions of Bankers and Wall Street and the inability to cooperate in the aftermath of the financial collapse.

Help:Navigation (see Help Tells how to log in, create your bio, describe your research, design pages for your discussion groups and courses, comment and post, etc. Use discretion: what you write on the wiki is public and explicitly GFDL licensed for redistribution with citation. Write publicly with forethought. Redistribution of indiscretion will happen when you don't want it. You can also write iteratively, in steps, and revise indefinitely, but drafts are saved in the history tab and are thus accessible. Wikipedia:Wikipedia:How to edit a page

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Usage

http://wholinkstome.com/url/intersci.ss.uci.edu (google rank=4 of 10 is below the top 29% and above the lower 22%), e.g. at about 40% of the way to the very top sites (top half ~ 60%). This is not the more general UCI link rating which is:

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Log-ins available from the syops

From 1997-2011 logins were available to anyone, but by March 2011 systematic hackers were sufficiently common that, without all the editor and bot resources of Wikipedia, requests for new logins should go to the mediawiki sysops, drwhite@uci.edu. Your full or abbreviated name will be your login and you will be sent a password that you can change. Login will allow you to add and edit pages.

"Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge" Cicero, courtesy of Seth Abrutyn.